China’s decade long surge into becoming an economic power house and global heavy hitter has given rise to a myriad of theories and assertions regarding the role of Asia in this century. It has been widely touted that the 21st century will be “Asia’s Century” as the US fades from virtual hegemony and hyperpower and joins it’s European cousins in the ranks of imperial has beens. That the on going economic crisis embattling what I’ll term the “Old Order of Global Primacy” has left China’s 10% annual economic growth unscathed seems to be validating those theories and assertions.

Map via Wellesly College Chinese Politics

For example, I meet you, and unbeknownst to you, I add you to my unFacebook. I meet another person and add them. Later I find out that you and he are business partners. I then “friend” you to him on my unFacebook. I give access to this database to all the people in my organization and send them out with iPhones and a handy little app that they can use to snap facial photos, grab a GPS point for last location, and fill in some quick details about subjects. Sometimes my people use their iPhones to show photos of subjects to other people to verify names or aliases, corroborate last known locations, and make links with other subjects in the database. Multiple aliases could be resolved through face recognition software. Multiple spellings could be resolved through morphological analysis. Personal details, links, and geolocation data can all be captured on the go in a very simple and familiar system (everybody knows how to use Facebook). As these bits of disparate information come into my UnFacebook, I use this data for an advanced type of link analysis, or scalable social network analysis (SSNA). It seems to me that a system like this would be handy for soldiers fighting an insurgency.

I would assume that law enforcement organizations have something like this that has been the result of a long evolution of link analysis technology. Doing a little research I found a list of tools used by the NSA in James Bamford’s The Shadow Factory (pp. 149): PatternTracer, Agility, AMHAS, Anchory, ArcView, Fastscope, Hightide, Hombase, Intelink, Octave math, Document Management Center, Dishfire, CREST, Pinwale, COASTLINE, SNACKS, Cadence, Gamut, Mainway, Marina, Osis, Puzzlecube, Surrey, Tuningfork, Xkeyscore, and Unified Tasking Tool. This is simply a list of tools used by the NSA. I could not find out what many of these did. That may be because they are specific to the NSA, or historical with no trace left on the net. ArcView is the only social network analysis tool I could confirm. Pinwale is data-mining software, which can be used for SSNA. But this is beside the point.

The military has its own needs and different ways of collecting intel than domestic law enforcement agencies, or even the NSA. With all the COIN work Western militaries have been conducting in the past decade, a flexible, automated, unFacebook-style link analysis application could be a benefit. Such an application probably exists, and if anyone has some information on it, please share. If not, this is a potential market for an enterprising startup. Please contact me if you would like to collaborate. ;)

Iran is the new Eastern Europe during the last phase of the Cold War. Like Poland during the heady days of Solidarity in the early 1980s, the protestors in the streets of Iranian cities are not crazed ethnics demonstrating on behalf of some illiberal blood-and-soil nationalism, but enlightened, technologically savvy multitudes crying out for universal values of democracy and human rights. As such, they have captured the imagination of liberal intellectuals in the West. Even as the United States is tied down with 200,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran promises to be the signal issue of our time.

Rare for Kaplan, he lays out a policy prescription for the US President—well, be like Reagan, but more specifically:

Given that the regime could last another month or another decade, what is President Barack Obama to do? Throughout his first year in office, he’s attempted the Nixonian détente approach: talk, work back channels, get the two governments to negotiate on the basis of naked national interests. That approach seems to have failed—less because it doesn’t make sense than because the Iranian regime is so internally divided that it can’t adequately respond. That leaves us with the Reaganite approach: be open to far-reaching talks, as President Ronald Reagan was with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but do nothing to legitimize the Iranian system. And, throughout any discussions, adopt the rhetoric of democracy. Make it clear that Washington is on the same side of history as the demonstrators, but also make it clear that the door is open to negotiations with those in power. And to avoid the risk of undermining the demonstrators by overt American support of them (thus catering to regime’s basest conspiracy theories), Obama should talk about democracy only in general, albeit pointed, terms, without directly referring to Iran. That is, he should get the language of universal values out over Iranian air waves as much as possible: encouraging the demonstrators without specifically backing them.

We are not in control. But something wonderful has begun: nothing less than the most positive development in the Middle East since President Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem. And while that daring gesture led only to a cold bilateral peace between Egypt and Israel, the Green Revolution in Iran carries the potential to unleash a true Islamic Reformation.

The story of Sir Isaac Newton stumbling upon the nature of gravity after seeing an apple fall to earth is one of the most enduring, and endearing, anecdotes of modern physics. Newton (1642-1727) was a genius with many skills. He laid the groundwork for classical mechanics, which usefully describes all macroscopic phenomena affecting our daily lives, built the first reflecting telescope, showed that white light was a mixture of colors, and invented calculus. His famous Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Principia) was to physics what Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was for biology.

Less well known is that Newton was a deeply religious Christian who wrote more on Biblical interpretation than he did on science. In particular he was very uneasy about the doctrine of the Trinity, and wrote a weighty tome entitled An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture. Most of his ire was aimed at the first letter of John (1 John 5:7), which in the King James’ Bible reads “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” By comparing early manuscripts in many languages, he came to the conclusion that the final phrase was a late addition. His writings were so controversial that he dared not publish them during his lifetime, yet modern scholars concur, and the Revised New Standard Version has been revised to end with, “these three agree.”

Newton also had a bone to pick with the doctrine esposed by Bishop Athenasius (293-373) of Alexandria (Egypt) over the question of whether Christ was a different ‘substance’ from the Father. Athenasius proposed a robust Triniarian creed, as opposed to the doctrine that there was a time when only God the Father existed, and that Christ was in some small way subservient to him. Here again, Newton wrote a spirited critique—Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and his Followers in the 1690s—and once again, history has him on the winning side. Athenasius’ creed is consigned to the archives of historical documents.

Today these issues of Christian theology seem arcane and tedious, but don’t think for a moment that Newton’s hesitation to publish during his lifetime was whimsical. His views in the 17th century were subject to prosecution, as it was an offense to deny any of the persons of the Trinity to be God, punishable with loss of office. Newton’s caution was clearly warranted, as a friend lost his professorship at Cambridge for this very reason in 1711. By comparison, he got off lucky—an eighteen-year-old student, Thomas Aikenhead, was hanged at Edinburgh, Scotland in 1697 for denying the Trinity.

Newton’s biography leaves two lessons to today’s students of history.

First, the fathers of the natural science—Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, and :ahem: Alfred Russel Wallace—did not find natural science to be incompatible with their Christian faith. If they merely attended church and nodded agreement at religious thought of the time, it might be easy to dismiss them as charletans who stuck to the thought of the time to protect themselves. Yet this was far from the case—all three wrote careful engagements of religion at the time, and all had unique takes on theology. This seems hard to consider when we see the vocal vitriol of those such as geneticist Richard Dawkins, who claims title to Darwin’s legacy of evolution.

Second, when we recoil at today’s Islamic religious zealots, such as the Ayatollah of Iran ordering the assassination of Salman Rushdie for blasphemy, public commenters think this is evidence of the intollerance of Islam. Yet we might stop and ponder what future generations will think of some of our attempts in the past of enforcing orthodoxy and the results it caused in spreading fear and stifiling free expression. How will history view us both centuries from now? After all, Rushdie survives to this day and has claimed celebrity status overseas. Thomas Aikenhead was not nearly so lucky.

I believe the Prime Minister is Robert Cecil, an (in)famous traditional, aristocratic conservative.

I tweeted this but it is too awesome not to share here: The world’s first Swiss Army knife has been revealed – made 1,800 years before its modern counterpart.

Makes you wonder if there was ever a Primus MacGyverus…

Via William Gibson, aka @GreatDismal.

I think the population’s ignorance about their state of affairs is overblown, and I don’t think that Hitchens’ one racist, xenophobic tour guide is quite as representative of the population as he claims to think, and I think that in the past few years the people of the DPRK have learned that their government is dirt poor compared to their southern neighbor. (The country recently backtracked on its currency devaluation after it unleashed public outrage, a mighty rare occurrance.) But that’s about the only point of optimism in the Korea.

Hitchens’ article is titled A Nation of Racist Dwarfs, and the reason is clear only at the end of the article:

Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.

But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

I think the last line is interesting coming from Hitchens, a left-wing radical who supported advocated invading Iraq on the grounds that the civilized nations of the world will inevitably have to face off against such a tyrant, and that it was better to do so on our terms. He stops short of advocating a strike on North Korea, but the dreaded implication is that we are going to have to deal with the fallout from North Korea’s tragic situation at some point, and the legacy will likely be with us for a century or more.

The job of the intellectual, the so-called public intellectuals as we are now for some reason doomed to call it, is or ought to be to say something along the following lines: “It’s more complicated than that… You mustn’t simplify this… There’s more complexity to the subject.” That’s what an intellectual should be doing to public discourse, one thinks. But then there are occasions when it seems to me that the reverse is the case. That actually what the really thoughtful person should be saying is actually: “It’s simple! Do not make complexity here, where none is required.”

You can listen to the above quote (and a bit extra) straight from Hitchens below:

What an excellent point. Often I find myself exasperated with commentary on the internet which frequently represents the extreme and the childish, with no indication of understanding or nuance. The short-form of the blog only exacerbates the problem. It is almost enough to abandon the enterprise altogether. But all hope for public discourse on the internet is not lost! The point made by Hitchens, that sometimes things are just that simple tempers my irritation. It is a useful aphorism to keep bias in check.

Of course, the problem remains of proper application. The non-complexity argument cannot be used for every issue, and one must recognize its misuse and call it out. Truly complex issues should be handled in other forae, such as academic journals or conferences. But there are issues that can be broached in shorter formats. For example issues of morality or principle. Abandoning relativism, properly defining terms and being transparent in speech (as Orwell advises in his classic essay Politics of the English Language) should lead to clearer understanding in general. Casting off complexity is not drawing an arbitrary line in the proverbial sand (eg. moralizing), but stripping away the unwarranted and getting at the core of an argument. Often simple is not easy, and complexity is used to obfuscate. Nobody ever said being a public intellectual would be easy.

Listen to the entire Christopher Hitchens interview with EconTalk.

Give us your answer in the comments, but naturally, no googling or any other form of unfair play, please! I’ll be back with the answer in about 24 hours.

(See past pop quizes here, here and here.)

The French government has refused to grant citizenship to a foreign national on the grounds that he forced his wife to wear the full Islamic veil. The man, whose current nationality was not given, needed citizenship to settle in the country with his French wife.

But Immigration Minister Eric Besson said this was being refused because he was depriving his wife of the liberty to come and go with her face uncovered. Last week, a parliamentary committee proposed a partial ban on full veils. It also recommended that anyone showing visible signs of “radical religious practice” be refused residence permits and citizenship.

I salute France in standing up for its values. No foreigner has a right to citizenship or even residence and twisted ideas of about fairness, political correctness and tolerance have led countries to act against their own interest by allowing in those who do not share even the most fundamental values of the land. For particularly sick examples see the Netherlands and Great Britain.

As immigration from the developing countries to industrialized countries continues to grow, and communication and transportation technology increases the movement of people across national borders, the question of the value and meaning of citizenship is something that must be raised again. If citizenship boils down to birth location or having the correct paperwork, then it is meaningless. Readers, what does citizenship mean today, particularly in a time of multiple loyalties?

Last year I posted this fantastical map of WWI Europe from Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. This week I read the book, which I found to be an excellent escape. It was supposed to be nightstand reading, but I couldn’t put it down.

Rather than a graphic novel in the Dark Knight and Watchmen style, this is an illustrated novel. The hardcover is thick, but is a quick read with black and white illustrations every 5 or 10 pages. I think the audiobook would be really entertaining, but the illustrations make the printed version worthwhile. If you have an imaginative 15 year old in the house, this book is highly recommended. I am sure many in the CA community — steeped in history, science and technology — would also get a kick out of this book.

The only criticisms I have — aside from the negative characterisation of Churchill — are technical: character development is rather unsubtle, and mixed metaphors run rampant as a school of fish. That said, this book is not supposed to be Chaucer. It is meant for young readers and is thus fast-paced with lots of action. It is a fantastical adventure that is also character building. Westerfeld’s strength is in descriptive detail. He has filled his alternate reality with historical hooks and clever technological innovations. As stated in the Epilogue: “That’s the nature of steampunk, blending future and past.”

The world of Leviathan is highly imaginative and engaging. I can’t wait for the second installment.

Below is a trailer featuring many of the illustrations in the book. See more at Scott Westerfeld’s blog.

• The military should move away from the quarter-century old policy of being prepared for “two major, conventional wars at one time” as a guiding principle for its military. Noting that the country is already engaged in two major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the new focus should be a broader range of security challenges, including fighting insurgencies, dealing with potentially hostile nations such as Iran, and engaging in cyberwarfare.
• Implement a new joint air-sea battle plan in response to threats such as China’s persistent military buildup and Iran’s possession of advanced weapons. This would combine the strengths of each service to conduct long-range strikes that could utilize a new generation of bombers, a new cruise missile, drones launched from aircraft carriers, and unmanned underwater vehicles.
• Transform Guam into a hub for security activities in the Western Pacific while remaining aligned with Japan’s defense forces. No mention is made of the current Futenma base relocation controversy.
• The military forces are under strain and the US should help foreign militaries build capacity. Also, focus on relations with allies and friendly nations and promote training in foreign languages and foreign cultures for US military personnel.
• Climate change and energy dependence were recognized for the first time. The US could see new opportunities and challenges in the Arctic, and there could be an increase on the demand for U.S. forces in humanitarian disasters.

Meanwhile, courtesy Lexington Green comes this a working paper published at the Royal United Services Institute is far less formal but asks the tough questions about the future of British military policy, and itemizes five options for future

Option 1 – Global Guardian: Continue ground operations for robust stabilization in Afghanistan. This will allow British governments to develop and sustain aspirations of global influence. Naval and air forces would have relatively minor supporting roles. The risk of this option is that it creates a force structure that is not well prepared for other uncertainties, and there is a long-term political aversion to commitments to enduring ground occupation.

Option 2 – Strategic Raiding: This ‘maritime’ option recognizes that there is unlikely to be the political will in government or in the electorate for further embroilment in operations such as Iraq and Afghanistan in the foreseeable future, and instead focuses on short-term operations using agile specialist ground forces and special forces. The UK would make a substantial contribution to
maritime security, which would permit a degree of international leadership in this respect.

Option 3 – Contributory Option: A selection would be made from the present capabilities to specifically “contribute” to the needs identified in an international context, both in the US-UK context and the European context. This option would sacrifice any possibility for national autonomy for intervention operations, because the UK would be dependent on other nations for all the capabilities that it had surrendered.

Option 4 – Gendarmerie Option: This option accepts that aspirations to be a major expeditionary power are unaffordable and instead focuses ground forces on contributing to stabilization. This would be a strategic bargain without the aspiration to retain high-intensity combat capability. This option could also include some constabulary naval capability to contribute to maritime security.

Option 5 – ‘Little Britain’: This option focuses specifically on defense and internal security of the British islands. This option abandons any strategic bargain. There is also the question of the UK’s Dependent Territories around the world to which there is a legal obligation for security—either abandon them or force them to take autonomy.

My immediate thought is whether the future of Russia may one day look like Nigeria. With dozens of ethnic groups, religions and a history of separatism and Islamic extremism it’s not unthinkable. Combine that with the country’s increasing reliance on its oil and gas industries for both economic and political power, and key elements are there for such a campaign.

I met and spent time chatting with a Pakistani currently trading in goods at one of Dubai’s markets. He shared with me stories from his previous job, working from 1998 to 2006 as a police officer in Qatar. He lost his job as the country moved towards “Qatarization,” the favoring of local nationals for public sector jobs, but he seemed happy enough in his new business, which has him occasionally travel to China, the place of manufacture for the products sold at his business. (Our conversation began when he noticed Japanese language material on me, which prompted him to ask me, “You speak Chinese?”)

I persistently asked him for stories about his old job, and he shared with me a few stories. The most amusing story he had was when one day, he was patrolling the car park of one of the few hotels in Doha where Westerners could drink alcohol. A clearly intoxicated 40-ish Western woman walked out of the hotel and said to him, “You’re my husband!” He told the woman he was not her husband, and tried to calm her from being so blatantly intoxicated in public, but his partner, initially some distance away, walked over and interrupted them to say, “I’m your husband!” The two left together, with his partner ordering/pleading with him not to report the incident.

Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games. Perhaps the worst thing he ever saw was a person who tried to smuggle heroin from Afghanistan through the airport wrapped with and inside the body of a dead baby, aged only several months. He thought it likely that the smuggler/mother was sentenced to death, considering the amount of drugs they found. Drug abuse is a big social problem in many countries in the Middle East, and he said there were three primary reasons that smuggling persisted—first, the money available from its sale means that poor and desperate people can always be paid to act as mules; second, no matter what the police and authorities try, the criminals are always adapting and changing their methods; and third, there are so many migrant laborers regularly pouring into the Middle East that it is inevitable that mules/smugglers will slip through their checks.

I met a Swedish teacher at one of the middle schools in Dubai has a unique story of life in the Middle East. At age 20, ten years ago, she met a Libyan man in Sweden and they moved to Tripoli and got married. He worked there in cross-border business and they lived together in Tripoli for five years.

Her years in Libya started out great. Her husband was wealthy and involved in international business, and she had all the money she wanted to spend on shopping and travel. She visited every corner of the civilized Muslim world and regularly returned to Sweden during the hot summer season. She even met Gaddafi, who she described as “wearing crazier headdress than I had to wear.” But over time, she found her time in Libya to be exhausting and demoralizing. Outside the home, she had to cover her hair, showing only her eyes and nose with the local garb, and her husband, who was barely religious when they met in Sweden, slowly became more devout and restricted her freedom. The last straw was their twenty day pilgramage to Mecca, which she described as a “nightmare.”

They ultimately got divorced and she moved back to Europe, earning a junior degree in education, but she found that she found people in Western society difficult to relate to and felt an undefinable frustration living in Western society. So she moved to Dubai and now works in an international middle school, teaching students aged 10-12.

She said she shuddered when she heard Western women idealize relationships with rich Arab men—“Think of the most abusive emotional relationship you could have with a Western man, and the worst possible relationship you could have with your in-laws, and that is the best you can expect with a relationship with an Arab man in the Arab world.”

I was being driven to a work meeting with some colleagues, and while manuevering in the very tight parking lot, our Indian driver brushed the backside of an Arab man with the front right bumper. The man appeared unhurt, but he spun around and was furious—”Can’t you see where you’re going!” Our driver rolled down the window and mumbled an apology, and the Arab man waved his hand at him telling him to get out of the car.

It’s probably worth noting that he was aged somewhere between 40 to 60, dressed in a dish dash and kafiya, and getting into a Porsche. Lesson number 1 of life in Dubai is to never piss off a local—especially not a wealthy local.

I was sitting in the back seat with one other colleague and slowly got out of the car to make sure I was watching what happened, but a more senior colleague in the front seat got out and joined the driver in conversation. The Indian driver acted like a social retard, saying “Sorry, but…” and then telling the angry victim why he couldn’t see him and it wasn’t his fault, which prompted an explosion. Fortunatley, my colleague interupted by saying, “I’m terribly sorry sir, it was an accident, he’s ordinarily a very good driver and we’re really sorry.” At the word “sir,” a smile crept on to the man’s face and the incident was over—he said OK, got in his car and drove away. My colleague remarked, “All he wanted was to see a Westerner in a business suit be respectful and apologize.”

“… they also have large corporate parties down here.”

Stalin-themed corporate parties? Pleasant. From Tsar Podcast.

When Iraq—a socialist republic that overthrew its Hashemite king in the late 1950s—invaded the Persian Gulf Emirate of Kuwait, one justification was the “liberation” of the country from a tyranical monarch. Not surprisingly, the reaction by Arab governments to this invasion was closely linked to its system of government. Consider the following map, together with the map above:

The divide is clearest in the Arabian Peninsula—all the monarchies of the GCC backed fellow charter state Kuwait, while Yemen, which had overthrown its monarch in North Yemen in the 1960s and which had a contentious relationship with the Saudis, backed Saddam. The Palestinian Liberation Organization also voiced support for Saddam (which drastically hurt their international political standing for several years). Libya spoke out against any Arab military action against Iraq, Sudan quietly voiced support for Saddam, while Morocco’s King sent troops to join the coalition forces. Looking at the first map, and seeing the conflict as a republican v.s. monarch war, the allegiances thus far look relatively predictable.

It is only in Egypt, Jordan and Syria that this model is reversed. US ally Egypt and pro-Iranian Syria backed the US coalition. Jordan’s King Hussein decided to voice support for Saddam, either because of general public opinion or because of his refusal to ally with the Saudis against another Arab country, and its US relationship suffered as a result. Meanwhile, Algeria, which was in the process of violent democratic reforms, saw its political elite divided on the subject and never took any official position, while Tunisia, a monarchy republic of the Mediterranean, wanted to stay out of the conflict. (Lebanon barely had a foreign policy at the time and trying to escape its violent civil strife and ipso-facto control by Syria was just coming to an end at this time.)

These fault lines were completely different during the Iran-Iraq War, when two republics were warring with each other. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE (through Abu Dhabi), and most Arab countries backed Iraq, and it was only Syria, Libya, and Sheikh Maktoum of Dubai that backed Iran. But that was when a secular Sunni Arab state was fighting a Shitte Islamist revolutionary republic. Then, the fault lines were different.

The Peace and Security Council is concerned with resolving conflicts between member states and with helping sort out domestic political turmoil. Other states picked late on Saturday for three year terms on the body were Kenya, Burundi and Equatorial Guinea.

A bit like placing Haiti in charge of UN-Habitat.

“This is like a civil war on steroids, a post-apocalyptic armageddon with child soldiers smoking heroin, cross-dressing cannibals, systematic rape, it’s total hell on earth.”

But for those of you read this and think the world is beyond hope, don’t forget that General Butt Naked, who makes an appearance in the opening of the documentary, has been saved by Jesus, and there’s now a documentary out on his redemption, The Redemption of General Butt Naked.

1) In the economic system, what you can’t count doesn’t count.
2) The environment is an externality—it doesn’t ‘count’.
3) What can’t be measured can’t be reasoned about: it’s either economics or irrationality.
4) In economic terms, sacrificing near-term gains for possible long-term benefits for posterity is irrational.
5) Probability and harm can be priced, and so every risk has its price.
6) Everything has its price.
7) By definition, profit maximisation is social responsibility.
8) By definition, markets are efficient and regulation inefficient.
9) We can use the past to model and predict the future.

My quick take just to get the discussion rolling: as any historian will tell you, context is important (1 and 2); I am iffy on 3 since concepts (justice, morality) can be reasoned about but metrics are handy especially when policy-making; yes on 4; i don’t get 5; 6 is not nonsense (except in quantum mechanics) since price doesn’t necessarily mean gold; 7 I agree; 8 is a strawman argument so I agree; 9 conflates “prediction” with “forecasting”, which I am not sure Nils is clear on.

Since these are all short tweets the points are difficult to qualify and we must tread carefully. That said, I think it is a good check list for examining bias, and a good discussion starter.

That story begins with Antoinette “Toni” Gardiner, who was born near Ipswich, England in 1941 and grew up like any other ordinary English girl during World War II. After finishing school she worked as a secretarial assistant on the set of Lawrence of Arabia, and when King Hussein of Jordan visited the set (he allowed his soldiers to act as extras in the film and was supporting its production) a party was hosted for him which he attended and the young English typist caught his eye. She charmed him with her honesty and plain speaking, and they shared much in common—they both loved the outdoors—and the King soon fell in love.

That was all it took. Gardiner converted to Islam, they got married, and she was renamed Muna al-Hussein, which means “Hussein’s Delight.” She refused to take the title of Queen and was not called Princess until after the birth of her first son. She was the King’s second wife; he had divorced his previous wife, from Egypt, years before.

Princess Muna gave birth to four of the King children, including Prince Abdullah, the King’s first son, and also raised Princess Alia, the daughter from the King’s first marriage. But the marriage to the king did not last and they divorced in 1972. The King may have had a roving eye, but it is worth noting that in his four marriages, he never had a second wife, on the grounds that it would be unfair to Muna. And Muna remained a member of the royal family and an important figure in Jordanian society.

Abdullah was his father’s eldest son and should have been the appointed heir his entire life, but there was political instability in Jordan in the 1970s, and his father appointed his brother as crown prince. This lasted for decades, with Abdullah a minor figure in the Hashemite family, studying at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the UK and doing goofy things like appearing as an extra in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. It was just as King Hussein entered the final year of his life that Macbeth-like intrigue saw the various wives and family members jockeying for influence. Mere weeks before King Hussein’s death, Abdullah appointed Crown Prince, and took the crown the day his father died. While his half-brother served as crown prince for several years, that was eventually removed from him and last year, the king’s son Prince Hussein (the grandson of Princess Muna) became Crown Prince.

The Hashemite royal line traces its origins back forty-three generations to the Prophet Mohammed himself. Yet as of the current king, from here on, it can also owe itself to the filming of one of Hollywood’s greatest epics.

On any given day it’s easy to give over to the pessimistic vision of what’s going on around us. We are inundated by media reports rife with live reports depicting either the lowest points of humanity or the greatest suffering of humanity. In just the last few days news reports informed us of the fiery crash of an airliner out of Lebanon (breathlessly claiming that “sabotage,” despite the claims of the Lebanese government, was hardly off the table,) a synchronized series of explosions directed at hotels in Baghdad had killed at least twenty and of course the media’s darling of the year; Haiti’s being smashed from abjectly failed state to that of, well, no state.

Combine this with the likes of a decade long promise of apocalyptic climate change, the pervasive experts promising the next existential terrorist threat, the ever present promise of looming economic ruin and it’s no small reason that we look into our televisions, listen to our car radios and conclude that the near future of humanity is, as succinctly stated by my learned colleague; “fucked.”

So I read, with particular interest , this piece by Thomas Barnett titled “New Rules: The Fallacy of an Increasingly Dangerous World.”

The meat of the article expresses exactly what the title entails. As bad as things are we, as a planetary collective, are forging a legacy quite contrary to what pessimists might paint:

In 1950 the planet consisted of 2.5 billion souls, while today our global population approaches 7 billion. Likewise, the number of U.N. member states has roughly doubled to nearly 200, meaning a greater number of possible configurations for war. In short, despite far more bodies and far more states, wars have nonetheless become less frequent and less lethal, while we as a planet have grown stunningly more interconnected and thus interdependent. Even the three biggest conflicts of the last decade—Iraq, Sudan and Congo—involved, at most, 2 percent of the world’s population.

That amazing trajectory now places us far closer to Immanuel Kant’s vision of “perpetual peace” than to Thomas Hobbes’ “state of nature.”

As I stated above, I’m not a “pessimistic realist.” While I’m loath to accept being pigeon-holed into some neat category either politically or intellectually I could live with the label “pragmatic optimist.” I agree that we are “far closer” to Kant’s perpetual peace than Hobbes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” but would argue that we’re only beginning to move away from Hobbes’ “war of all against all” in too many areas of the world. That’s a beginning that I’m much more willing to embrace than the pessimist’s embrace of the “beginning of the end.” We’re a fallible species and guilty of our own self induced eras of violence and ignorance but on the whole we’ve maintained a remarkable ability to advance. And I believe we’ll continue that advance.

I’d be curious to see what our own readers think in terms of just how dangerous our world is and just what their positions are regarding the overarching progress (or regress as it may be) of humanity.

Curzon’s favorites: Tanzania, Lebanon and Israel win for cool; Afghanistan and Germany win for the instrumental; Philippines, Madagascar and Panama win for team spirit; and Kosovo wins for sexy.

There are two major yet unrelated conflicts taking place in Yemen—the Sunni and Al Qaeda-linked separatist threat in the central south of the country (a major concern of the United States) and a Shia uprising in the north (alarming to the Yemenis and Saudis, possibly supported by Iran, but of little relevance to the rest of the world). And carefully distinguishing between the two is critical to keep the US out of a real quagmire.

Let’s start from the beginning. A century ago, Yemen was divided into two spheres of influence, with the Ottomans controlling the Red Sea coastal area (North Yemen), while the Aden coast was a protectorate of the British (South Yemen). After World War I, a Shia spiritual leader established himself as King in North Yemen and titled his country the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen. Although he initially fought with the growing Saudi state, the Saudis backed the king during the 1960s civil war, whereas the Soviets and Egyptians backed a republican insurgency, which came to an end in 1970. Meanwhile, the former British Protectorate became the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in 1967, also enjoying backing from the Soviets. Perhaps due to the dual Red sympathies, perhaps due to Arab nationalism, the two states agreed to unify in the early 1970s, and ultimately merged in 1990. (A group in South Yemen declared and fought for independence during several months in 1994.)

The Cold War conflicts are essentially unrelated to today’s violence. Back then, the differences were primarily political. Today, the roots of the conflict are religious and tribal. The northern uprising in the mountains along the Saudi border is a Shia rebellion based on anger and frustration with the persecution and neglect of the mountainous region by the (Sunni) government. The Yemeni and Saudi governments are fighting this rebellion, and the Saudis have blockaded the coast, on the pretext of stopping Iranian arms from reaching the rebels. The violence has caused widespread displacement of people in the areas, as the Shia rebels and government troops treat civilian casualties as a secondary concern.

The border with Saudi Arabia and Yemen was definitively demarcated in 2000.

The Saudis are guilty of aggravating and prolonging the conflict. Wary of taking too many losses on the ground and unable to do much by air and sea, they have recruited the Hashed, a local tribe, to fight against the Huthi, the tribe central to the Shia rebels. The Hashed have several incentives to continue fighting for as long as possible—they have a long-standing feud with the Huthi, and make a great deal of money from fighting for the Saudis, and may be coming up with schemes to prolong the conflict. According to a source of Al Jazeera:

If [the Hashed are] given the mission of taking a particular mountain, for example, they’ll call up the Huthi leaders and tell them: ‘We’re getting five million riyals to take the mountain. We’ll split it with you if you withdraw tonight and let us take over’… After the tribesmen take charge, they hand it over to the Saudis… The next day, the Huthi return and defeat the Saudis and retake the mountain… It’s been happening like this for weeks.

No Western country wants to get involved in this fiasco, and we shouldn’t be baited into participating by either the Saudis or the Yemenis. Prince Khaled bin Sultan, the deputy Saudi defense minister, says he has “confirmed information” that al-Qaeda has been communicating and co-ordinating tactics with the Shia rebels, a charge Saudi and Yemen government official regularly trumpet as they justify their actions. They are also shouting that the Iranians are backing the rebels. But all of this is nonsense, and its worth comparing the map above, showing the area of the civil war, with the map below, showing strikes against Al Qaeda in recent months carried out by Yemeni forces. Note that the areas are entirely unrelated.

Then also compare the Shia uprising with this map showing key terrorist attacks in Yemen over the past decade. Once again, the map of attacks shows no common regional area with the Shia rebellion in the north.

Yemen has been a terrorist haven for the past decade. Kaplan wrote about the country in 2003, generally praising the president as a pragmatist, while recognizing that he has long forgiven and even allied with many of the violent Sunni tribalists in bed with Al Qaeda. And although Yemen only launched into the headline news after the Christmas 2009 attempted bombing, the violence is not new—the government killed dozens of Al Qaeda suspects in the weeks before Christmas, while the Shia rebel violence had spilled into Saudi territory by at least November. But the US, and the news media, must be cognizant of the fact that these two conflicts are entirely separate. The US must only assist Yemen in eradicating Al Qaeda elements in the central and southern coastal region of the country, and must not get involved in the Saudi-Yemeni border conflict that originates in the Sunni-Shia tribal rivalry of Arabia. If policymakers are awake, they should already know that, but the lack of analysis focusing on this in the media is alarming.